Ask Slashdot: Could We Deal With the End of Time Zones? 990
First time accepted submitter hairyfish writes "Do we still need time zones? Time zones are a relic of the past, when different parts of the world were isolated, and 12 p.m. was whenever the sun was directly above your specific location. Now, in the Internet age, time is just an arbitrary number, and time zones are just unnecessary complexity. Why can't we scrap time zones altogether, and all just use UTC across the board? So here on the eastern seaboard of Australia, lunchtime will now be at 2 a.m., In New York it will be 4 p.m., and in Moscow it will be 8 a.m. There'll be some pain with the initial changeover, but from then on it's all good. Got a meeting with colleagues on the other side of the world? 4 a.m. means 4 a.m. for everyone. Got a flight landing at 3 p.m.? 3 p.m. now means 3 p.m. for everyone. For DST, you simply change your schedule rather than the clock (i.e. work and school starts an hour earlier during DST months). No confusion ever again. For someone whose work involves travel or communication across time zones, this is the best idea I've ever heard. So why aren't we doing it?"
"So why aren't we doing it?" (Score:2, Funny)
Slow news day? (Score:2)
Re:Slow news day? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)
What I'm curious about is how precisely this is any simpler than our current system. You do get the advantage of specifying a time that's globally valid, but for things that matter you still have to worry about what times are appropriate to expect a response from somebody in Georgia and depending upon which one the answer is likely to be different.
The real problem is that when you're traveling you'd then have to learn what times everything is done or convert those times to ones your familiar with, rather than the current system where most of those times are the same, just happen earlier or later with respect to your home.
The current system we have works in the instances where one needs that sort of coordination we've got GMT and UTC available.
Re:Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Suppose you're sitting in your New York office, and you want to call a colleague in an office in California, and you have to determine if now is a good time to call or not.
The way it is now, you look at your clock, see it's 10AM, and then mentally calculate the timezone difference: EDT is 3 hours offset from PDT. So it's 7AM in California, and now is probably too early to call your colleague, as he's probably still at home or on the way to work (or maybe still sleeping, depending on when he gets in).
Under a timezone-less scheme, you'd have a harder time, because there's no time zones to help you quickly calculate offsets. Instead, you'll think to yourself, "well, back when we had time zones, California was 3 hours apart from us, so it's like it's 7AM over there, so this is too early." But what happens in 20+ years when a younger generation comes along that doesn't remember the old time zone system? How exactly are they supposed to know that California is (roughly) three hours behind the east coast, and that it's now customary in California to start work at 5AM and leave at 2PM (unless they frequently communicate with people from there and remember this fact)? Do they have to start up some web application to tell them this? I suppose this would be one solution, but it seems pretty ridiculous when we already have a system now that doesn't require a constant internet connection or a nearby computer to tell us such a simple bit of information.
With time zones, all I have to remember is the GMT offsets of every place I'm interested in, and it's trivial for me to calculate local times for those places, which means I know what time most places start business and close business. Without time zones, I'll have to do a lookup for everything. Maybe if we get to the point where we all have constant internet connections wired into our brains, then they'll truly be obsolete, but not before then.
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The grammatically correct meme is "If Taco were still around".
Having said that, I've no doubt violated Muphry's Law somewhere in this post.
Evpxebyyrq. Shpx lbh NP. (Score:4, Funny)
telling us what the clock shall say
I, too, find it completely ridiculous that they actually TOLD people what their clock shall say. I heard about this one guy who didn't listen, they killed him, last I heard. Fucking fascist with their standards. I am interested to here what great insights the good roman_mir has to say on the subject.
Also,Qba'g guvax V qvqa'g frr jung lbh qvq gurer.
Re:Evpxebyyrq. Shpx lbh NP. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whelp, an anonymous anarchist has given me an unsubstantiated account of what seems like the most tedious and trivial event in law enforcement history. Guess that proves it... the government is evil!
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Not only are they raiding, but the methods are straight from the ATF playbook. SWAT team tactics, automatic weapons drawn, screaming, yelling, crying. Over MILK AND WOOD, for cryin' out loud. An old documentary of a raid can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSQ5EsbT4cE [youtube.com]
But I guess they're just treating everyone equally under the law, right?
Raw milk vs. raw fish (Score:3)
What's your idea of a "pure" food? Food comes from animals, dirt, or fungus.
If you don't like the idea of drinking secretions from a cow's mammary glands, just come out and say it.
For some people (not all), the idea of drinking milk from a TB-free herd as it came from the cow is appealing. It's cooled to halt bacteria growth.
>potentially deadly
You've got to be kidding. I'd love to hear if you support armed raids on sushi bars. Sushi being raw fish [sushifaq.com], of course. Oh, and fugu [wikipedia.org], too.
As long as the product is p
Re:"So why aren't we doing it?" (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about this: People this stupid have the right to vote.
The US is doomed.
Re:"So why aren't we doing it?" (Score:4, Insightful)
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It seems a little self important to suggest that if I want a 3pm meeting then everybody can attend because it's 3pm everywhere. One time-zone means that *some* of us will need to be sleeping at 3pm.
It's more than that. We've had UTC for a long time, and before that, we have had GMT for over a century. People decided not to adopt GMT as their local time, because of the psychological impact... how would you feel if you had to get up and go to work at 2am every day?
In time, sure, people would adjust... but if would still screw you over if you moved to a different part of the world... your mind is used to the sun rising at 1am, and now it suddenly has to adjust to the sun rising at 7pm?
What boggles the mi
Re:"So why aren't we doing it?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Bingo. When you go to a different place, you don't want to be somewhere where the sun rises at 11 PM and sets at 12 AM. You want a normal day, and the timezone tells you what the range of that day is. Timezones don't interfere with travel, they facilitate travel.
Look, can we just start ignoring libertarians? I mean, when someone is wrong once, you shrug. When they're wrong ten times, you raise an eyebrow. But when they're wrong hundreds of times, they need to be added to the twit filter. These people are the new bolsheviks, who also promised that the state would vanish under their leadership. Never trusted the communists, don't trust the libertarians. Same shit, different bucket.
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and people as stupid as you think he said anything about popular vote.
even worse... people as stupid as you think that the president is the most important figure in the government, as opposed to your senator or congressperson.
Sunrise tomorrow will be at ... (Score:3)
Re:"So why aren't we doing it?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the Federal government has every right to regulate its own agencies, which is all the time-keeping regulations do. They have no authority to tell you how to set your own clocks, nor do they even have any such laws. You have CHOSEN to use the same time convention, for reasons of convenience. Go ahead, set your clocks to whatever time you want, hell you can even invent your own clocks. I guarantee you they will not levy any fines, charge you with any crimes, nor make any other attempt to coerce you into adopting their system of keeping time.
Don't be an idiot.
Re:"So why aren't we doing it?" (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly so.
Living in the great state of Arizona, we've chosen to ignore the Federal Government's pronouncements on time, and their constant meddling with when time should change.
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In general yes, however the Bureau of Weights and Measures will come down on you hard if you try to use any of those invented measures in commerce. I saw a picture in the paper a few months back for 80 or so years ago where the agents had piled all the scales they had confiscated for failing to meet the accepted definition of weight in use in the US at the time.
But, in general you're correct about that, they're not going to arrest you for using GMT or refusing to acknowledge DST if you don't want to.
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This isn't "a bit valid," it is just intentionally obtuse. No one will stop you from creating a new unit, but it will be your responsibility to do the conversion. Aside from that, the current definition of a second wasn't set by any government.
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No, you are not within the law.
The law provides its own definitions of the terms "second," "foot," "mile," and "hour" (actually, the definition is made by NIST/BIPM, and adopted into the law, but the effect is the same). Thus, when the law says you are limited to 55 miles per hour, it is specifying a quantitative limit that is independent of the chosen units. You may convert that value into whatever measurements you choose, but the limit does not change even if its numerical value in a particular system o
Re:"So why aren't we doing it?" (Score:5, Insightful)
We're not doing it because it's retarded. Somehow the submitter thinks this will help people who travel for business. Excuse me?
When you land, you've got to say to yourself: "Ok...at home, I started work at 3AM, which was after the sun came up, so here, I have to get to work at....wait....what time does the sun rise here? 5PM? WTF?"
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Re:"So why aren't we doing it?" (Score:4, Informative)
Ah - Tea Party airhead - right?
Nope, just somebody who's never gonna give you up and never gonna let you down. (Hint, hint.)
Re:"So why aren't we doing it?" (Score:4, Informative)
And here's an actual fact: the U.S. government continually broadcasts the correct time no matter where you are (in the U.S., of course). They (I believe one source is the U.S. Navy) do it by broadcasting a radio signal that, when received by the appropriately-equipt clock/watch, will set that device to the correct time based on an atomic clock maintained by the U.S. government.
All you need to do to take advantage of this service is, when you next go clock/wristwatch shopping, make sure to ask if they have a product that features this capability (they should, even Walmart sells 'em). Most of the clocks in my house have this feature (wall clock, clocks in my computers -- the computers get the Navy time over the Internet, not via radio). Even my wristwatch (Casio) has a little radio receiver in it tuned to the government's time broadcast. Not only does this keep your watch accurate, it takes care of all of the DST stuff too. It's kind of fun to watch the wall clock get the "change DST" signal and "spin" its hands to the correct time (my wall clock can't "spin" backwards, so it has to make 11 complete revolutions in the fall). Hey, I'm easily entertained, what can I tell you?
I can set my wall clock, my computer clocks and even my wristwatch to ignore the DST signal (as someone pointed out, some states in the U.S. -- Arizona is one, I believe -- don't abide by the DST convention). In addition, there doesn't seem to be any huge premium charged for this feature. The radio-equipt clock on my wall only cost $20USD and my radio-equipt Casio wristwatch cost just $38USD.
So what was the "problem" again?
P.S. I can't believe Firefox's spell checker couldn't spell "equipt." I know the more commonly used word ("equipped") has the same meaning and Firefox could spell that version. But, c'mon, gang: "equipt" is two-characters shorter!
Re:"So why aren't we doing it?" (Score:5, Funny)
So, what you're saying is that the U.S. government controls your clocks by beaming invisible rays into them?
Is this even a real question? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this the type of crap we can come to expect now that CmdrTaco is gone?
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Unification is actually a very good idea generally. It will happen to language eventually, and it would be a good thing to happen to time, and if you despise the idea because of the low likelihood of actually being accepted worldwide, then you're just not thinking into the future far enough.
For now, both time systems would be a great thing, and I don't even travel much yet.
Re:Is this even a real question? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the unification of time systems is that 4am may be 4am everywhere, but now you'd need to know if that was the middle of the day in New York or the middle of the night. You still need to know all the time differences to have any meaningful interaction with other people, so the problem is no simpler. If you go on holiday you still need to learn to get up at 4pm instead of 6am, and it won't be as simple as just changing your watch and trying to adjust to the normal localised times you'd do those things.
So it's a whole load of pain changing the system for no gain, or even a step backwards. Woo.
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Thank you. Now there's a logical reason that this is a bullshit idea.
Abolish time zones, and you still need to know what the time zones are. Sure sounds like a simplified process to me!
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The problem with the unification of time systems is that 4am may be 4am everywhere, but now you'd need to know if that was the middle of the day in New York or the middle of the night. You still need to know all the time differences to have any meaningful interaction with other people, so the problem is no simpler. If you go on holiday you still need to learn to get up at 4pm instead of 6am, and it won't be as simple as just changing your watch and trying to adjust to the normal localised times you'd do those things.
So it's a whole load of pain changing the system for no gain, or even a step backwards. Woo.
Yeah, only an internet nerd wouldn't see the need to know when the sun would be up in the sky.
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The problem with the unification of time systems is that 4am may be 4am everywhere, but now you'd need to know if that was the middle of the day in New York or the middle of the night. You still need to know all the time differences to have any meaningful interaction with other people, so the problem is no simpler. If you go on holiday you still need to learn to get up at 4pm instead of 6am, and it won't be as simple as just changing your watch and trying to adjust to the normal localised times you'd do those things.
So it's a whole load of pain changing the system for no gain, or even a step backwards. Woo.
Exactly right! Time zones give us clues as to when to do things such as eat dinner or go to sleep when we travel. Also, it makes it easier to know when it's okay to phone someone. If you know it's 3AM where Grandma lives, you know it's probably not a good time to call her. If all you know is that it's 14:00 UTC where she lives, and where you live, you need to calculate how many hours it is between sunset and sunrise where she is living and is she therefore likely to be in bed. Time zones make that much
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If Bob, in the eastern US, sends Alice, in Hong Kong, a meeting request for "6pm", the system can just look at Bob's timezone localization, send the UTC equivalent of "6pm in bob world" to Alice's computer, which can then display the time that is locally meaningful to Alice according to her localization.
Isn't that exactly what any decent calendaring solution does already?
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When the best argument you can come up with is an insult, it's time to reconsider your position.
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Corollary: "Sometimes an impertinent question is so mind-bendingly fucking stupid that to waste time discussing the many ways in which it is stupid is an affront to all human endeavour."
Next time on "Ask Slashdot": "Why doesn't everyone just belong to the same religion? We could consolidate all the churches, temples, synagogues and mosques and use the space to build affordable housing!"
Re:Is this even a real question? (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux is twenty years old.
The IBM-compatible PC is a relic.
Modem handshake noise is no longer widely recognised.
Most people using computers have never seen a text screen.
And your UID has four digits, as does mine.
Now let's kick those darn youngsters off our Slashdot!
Re:Is this even a real question? (Score:5, Funny)
Modem handshake noise is no longer widely recognised.
*wipes tears from keyboard...*
Re:Is this even a real question? (Score:4, Funny)
It might be better to let the youngsters have Slashdot. :/
I bet those were CmdTaco's real leaving words.
"You damned kids can KEEP the lawn; I'm retiring to the Bahamas!"
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Sorry to be obtuse, "thinking outside the box" is great, but this is not "thinking outside the box". It's "not thinking...in the box". Some dweeb on Slashdot is the first person to suggest abolishing time-zones? Hardly.
"Could we deal with the end of Time Zones?" Yes. We could. A better question w
Before we ditch timezone...Let's kill DST first!! (Score:5, Insightful)
DST is a beast. Worse, the rules change over time!
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Only if we switch to DST completely. My summers would be completely ruined on the east coast if the Sun started setting at 6:30 in the afternoon in August.
People don't realize just how much they use DST's. especially in the northern latitudes.
Re:Before we ditch timezone...Let's kill DST first (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, the clock is just a number, if you believe the day should start earlier, talk to your management. Your colleagues would most likely disagree, but if they don't, you might convince them. It makes most sense if 12:00 is exactly at noon and the time matches the sun, not your work preferences.
If you want to get up an hour early in the summer (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to get up an hour early in the summer, get your ass out of bed!
Why should the rest of us screw up our sleep rhythms because you don't want to reset your alarm clock?
yes lets do it (Score:3)
I live in North Germany, 54 20 North, 10 8 East which is more to the north than Winnipeg and a little south of Calgary. So we have long days in summer and short days in winter. And DST has never helped by anything. It just costs a lot and people need weeks to adjust. If you have kids, you will observe that one day before the switch, they are awake before the "time" in the morning and the next day they are almost an hour late.
In short DST sucks. Why should anyone have jet lag every 6 month? It is just ridicu
Yes, ditch DST, time zones are useful. (Score:5, Insightful)
With time zones you can simply look up the time at a given location to know which part of the day it is, time corresponding to a part of the day is extremely useful, especially when you're moving through different countries or working with foreign people. It's much easier to change the time zone of your clock than to adjust to a day that starts at 16 o'clock. The different time zones give you more information, and given that most electronic devices can convert between them easily and display multiple at the same time, it's not really harmful.
DST is the beast that needs to die, because it makes it hard to represent the exact time me with the local time plus a simple offset. After DST dies, we should try to deal with unusual time zones that do not match the local solar mean time that you have in countries like Russia or offsets that have half an hour in them like you have in Iran.
If time zones make it difficult for you, work on the better integration of the tools dealing with them.
Dates get confusing (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we really want the date to change in the middle of the day? No, that is not practical. Most of the world still runs based on sleeping when the sun is down, so the time zone system still works.
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This single reason is more than enough to dismiss the idea.
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Yup, the whole notion of abandoning time zones pretty much defies our biology. We're built for day-night cycles, so it's only rational that our timekeeping system reflect those cycles.
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You are the retarded one. Their point is that /since/ people sleep at night, having "midnight" (according to GMT) be in the middle of the day or at some other odd time would be ridiculous. It would be evening here in the eastern US when the day goes from Monday to Tuesday. Everyone's still up. People might still be working. It'd be worse on the west coast where going from Monday to Tuesday would happen at 4 PM!
Time zones were created to fix local noon (Score:5, Insightful)
Submitter gets it wrong anyway. From TFS: "Time zones are a relic of the past, when different parts of the world were isolated, and 12 p.m. was whenever the sun was directly above your specific location."
Um, no. Time zones were *created* to deal with the problem of local noon being whenever the sun was directly above your specific location. That's what the world used for thousands of years, until rapid transit and communications made that impractical. With the coming of railroads, for the first time, people were frequently outrunning the sun. Time zones became a necessity. You can't have a rail time table if everybody's clock is different.
Also, I think the proposal is just moving the problem around. Currently we have to think, "Okay, they're 3 hours ahead of me, so 9 AM here is 12 PM there." With this proposal, we'd have to think, "Okay, they're 3 hours ahead of me, so when I'm starting work they're going to lunch".
And nobody's stopping anyone from doing everything on UTC. I know at least one person who sets his schedule that way.
DST -- as others have said -- that we can do without.
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DST -- as others have said -- that we can do without.
It would not have been so bad if they did not change the fucking rules.
It's so damn complex now that I have software settings that allow me to specify the exact date and time that DST starts and ends.
That's the real problem. Consistency. How much hardware is out there with firmware not able to handle the change? I'm not shocked that legislators could not figure out that they were screwing everybody over that had hardware and software that did not allow you to change the DST start and end date.
Re:Time zones were created to fix local noon (Score:4, Insightful)
If they tell me to call at 1pm, I'll call them at 1pm. 1pm my time that is. If it's 3am for him, he will sure as hell learn the lesson to include the time zone if he happens to be in a different one.
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It's definitely a meatspace problem. I think another part of the problem is when people don't think about timezones. If I'm on the west coast, and I have a conference call on the east coast, and they schedule it for 11am, whose time zone is it? If they don't specify, I assume that they mean 11am their time. I assume this because if they went to the trouble of correcting the time for my time zone, I would expect them to also specify the time zone--most problems of this sort stem from people not thinking
Prime Hours (Score:2)
Alright then, who gets the prime hours? Where 12pm means noon and 12am means midnight?
zero longitude (Score:3)
Zero longitude gets noon at noon, date line gets new day at noon. He said UTC which would make it thus.
Re:Prime Hours (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, nice subtle troll. I believe the French and Belgians would beg to differ with you.
Belgian cartographer Gerardus Mercator published the first modern atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, in 1570. He showed the Prime Meridian running through Antwerp. The Royal Observatory in Greenwich wasn't commissioned until 1675 -- 105 years later.
The Paris Observatory was commissioned in 1667 and completed in 1671, a good 4 years before the British even started on theirs.
The Greenwich line is used because when the vote was taken in 1884, over two-thirds of all ships and tonnage used it as the reference meridian on their maps. That is, British economic dominance was at its peak and most of the ships already used it. Oh, and it pissed off the French, which was always a plus to the Brits back then.
AM & PM (Score:5, Insightful)
Scrap AM & PM - most people can figure out a 24 hour clock. Time zones, on the other hand, make perfect sense.
Re:AM & PM (Score:5, Insightful)
AM and PM is stupid and can be confusing. People often mention the time and assume you know whether they mean AM or PM. Most countries use a 24 hour clock so ditch the 2*12 one. And also ditch the imperial system.
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AM & PM aren't typically that big of a deal in most cases. Just use a bit of common sense and if you really need to make sure that somebody shows up at 3:00 AM, then specify. Normally there's really only a 12 hour or so period of time where people are scheduling for, in cases where you're needing more than that, chances are you're using UTC or GMT
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18 may mean diddly squat for you when you're not using a 24 hour clock, but I bet you know the difference between 2 AM and 9 AM. The 24 hour clock just extends the same idea to all hours. Having to cart around two digits and a letter seems like more work than just two digits, even if neither of the two are crushing work as such once you're used to them.
And for the record, yes, most people in a 24 hour clock country don't say "we'll meet at 18" but "we'll meet at 6 in the evening". But they also say "we'll m
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Everywhere where someone ponders it for a moment.
It starts with 1am, 2am, 3am... 10am, 11am... what would you expect next? Well, considering it's a base 12 system, you'd expect 12am, followed by 1pm. Nooooo, what you get is 12pm, 1pm, 2pm... WTF? Did we do a #define 12 0 and found a compiler that allowed that?
Ante/post meridiem (Score:3)
It starts with 1am, 2am, 3am... 10am, 11am... what would you expect next? Well, considering it's a base 12 system, you'd expect 12am, followed by 1pm. Nooooo, what you get is 12pm, 1pm, 2pm... WTF? Did we do a #define 12 0 and found a compiler that allowed that?
AM = ante meridiem = before midday
PM = post meridiem = after midday
The Romans numbered the hours from noon in each direction. What we call "10:00 AM" today was "2 a.m." for them -- two hours before midday.
At some point, people decided it was easier to always count forward. I'd guess the invention of mechanical clocks might have had something to do with that. But they kept the a.m./p.m. convention for writing down times. It refers to which half of the day you're in; it's *not* another decimal place in th
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No, we want the few people in the world who divide a 24 hour day into to halves to STOP IT and get with the program.
So why aren't we doing it? (Score:5, Insightful)
So why aren't we doing it? Because it's a stupid idea. We still want noon to be when the sun is overhead, and midnight to be the middle of the night. Internet be damned, it's arbitrarily more convenient for most people, because most people don't travel all that often, and spend most of their time in their local time zone.
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Re:So why aren't we doing it? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are right, it's not solving a problem, it's changing it.
Current system: If someone tells you the time, you know relatively what they will be doing at said time. You can't work out when that is without your timezone and their timezone.
Other system: If someone tells you the timezone, you know when it is. You don't know what they'll be doing at the time unless you have their timezone, and you don't know what you'll be doing a the time unless you have your time zone.
It's the same issues but in reverse. It's about what is more useful to know by default - and that varies from person to person.
Re:So why aren't we doing it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. If you need to communicate a certain time to someone around the globe, you just list the time in UTC (basically what this idea is anyways). Or they could just, you know, look up the time difference, this being the Internet and all.
Why not (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not? Change is baaaad, uhkay? (Score:2)
We couldn't get the country to adopt metric measurements fer chrissakes. No way we could convince bubba that 2 AM is lunch break.
Agreed. (Score:2, Informative)
I fully agree - and have been saying this for some time.
The reality is though, it's very hard to get people to give up an old thing and move onto the new - look at the metric system in the UK, it's been mandated as the official thing for some time, and it's still not completely overtaken the imperial (even if only for road signs - another thing I argue, why are we not using both metric and imperial units on signs we are putting up now? It's insane to expect it to happen all at once, so why not start using d
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Not enough benefit (Score:3)
99.9% of the people never have a meeting with people on the other side of the world. Changing time zones would bring them only confusion.
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99.9% of the people never have a meeting with people on the other side of the world. Changing time zones would bring them only confusion.
They're confused all the time anyway. Changing the time won't make a difference.
No. (Score:2)
No. That is all. Now go back to playing with yourself.
We already use UTC! (Score:5, Insightful)
Our computer clocks are all using UTC already
The displayed time is adjusted to local time for the benefit of us humans
We can say "the best time to feed the animals is at 4 PM" and that applies to everyone on the planet. With your scheme we would have to give a much longer-winded explanation.
Sounds good but... (Score:2)
Sounds good but we (the US) couldn't even successfully switch over to the metric system. Yes it will be easier in the future but most people don't seem to care about long term goals when it means in the short term they'll have to remember that work is from 2-10 not 9-5. Also while we're at it we might as well switch to the 24 hour clock.
Do it if you want ... (Score:2)
No, it would lead to confusion (Score:3)
The function of time zones is that humans generally operate on Diurnal schedule. So wherever we are, we are going to wake in the morning and sleep at night. As such it makes sense to calibrate time to that. 08:00 is "morning", 20:00 is "evening". Change that, and it gets confusing any time someone travels. Even just across the US and you'd find everything gets thrown off.
What we have right now works well. Local time is always similar in terms of what is day and night. In the event you are communicating across time boundaries there's a simple answer: Specify the time zone. UTC is a good choice, or depending on what you are doing something else might be convenient. In online games it is usually "server time". The game server maintains time in the timezone it is physically located and will tell the player what it is. So you just reference to that.
Eliminating time zones wouldn't work mostly because people just wouldn't listen. They'd still use their time zone. If you desire universal time, just use it, use UTC. I do when I'm posting something to people from multiple time zones. However if you walk around and try to use it in daily life, people will just ignore you.
Not a relic of the past (Score:4, Insightful)
Wasn't time based on the rotation of the earth and the relative position of the sun in the sky? The hours of the day were tracked long before people started setting up multiple time zones...look at a sundial and there are numbers and those numbers were pretty much same. Time zones only date to the mid-1800's so they certainly aren't a "relic of the past".
Don't get me wrong, there certainly are advantages to using a standard time (and plenty of scientific, military, and technical applications use either UTC or GMT), but the average person will want to track time in relationship to their day as they experience it. And face it, the average person does very little traveling, very little interaction with people outside their time zone, and probably never interacts with someone in a significantly different time zone (i.e. on the other side of the world).
Amen! (Score:3)
But why keep the antiquated 24-hour day at all? Why not decimalize all of our time units? 10 hours per day, I say, 1000 days per year. Who cares if none of it lines up what we observe in our daily lives? That's what we all have smartphones for!
BTW, the premise of the question is wrong: time zones were not introduced for when different parts of the world were isolated. When locations are isolated, they don't need to agree on a time. Time zones were introduced for when different parts of the world were getting connected... specifically by railroads.
Not gonna happen (Score:3)
Ugh, this is one of those silly ideas that lead to all those jokes about computer people having no social skills, living in the basement, etc.
The only people that think about this are a small minority of computer geeks - a teeny, tiny fragment of the population. For the vast, VAST majority of humans... this will never even be something they'll spend more than a few seconds thinking about; and those few seconds will be when they're talking to a computer geek. There's no real benefit to the average human in switching to UTC - instead, it would probably be more trouble for them.
Those supposed "benefits" to frequent travellers... right now, lunchtime is around noon most places. So you fly some random distance, and someone wants to have a lunch meeting or a working dinner - unless they tell you what time that is, you're not going to have a clue. You say "of course they'd tell you what time the meeting is"... well, that's the same thing that happens right now, so there's no real UTC advantage there. If you need to schedule things in advance (say you're arranging a conference that's significantly far away from you), you'll need to figure out what the time-zone-equivalent time shift is to that location so you can schedule meals, select reasonable conference room reservation times, and the like.
Bottom line is - time zones aren't an arbitrary creation. They exist because they match how we tend to function. For most people they're actually advantageous.
i dont see how its any easier (Score:5, Insightful)
Either way, you have to know where you are to determine when stuff happens.
For example, I'm on the east coast. I travel to California, set my clock back 3 hours (or for a cell phone it adjusts its self possibly.. some phones do some don't). I still know stores open at 8 or 10 am.. lunch is at 12, done working at 5.. stores close at 9.. etc.
Now with the op's idea.. I have to constantly remember the stores open at 5am or 7am, lunch is at 9am, done working at 2pm, stores close at 6pm.. how is that *any easier*? Instead of changing one factor and the rest fall in place, you're now keep that one the "the same" and having to remember to adjust *all* of the rest that are typically a given constant.
And if you can't figure out UTC +/- then you have other issues.
New Planet (Score:3)
Ask yourself this. If tomorrow we (meaning "humanity") were to go colonize another earth-like planet someplace, and set up a bunch of settlements dotted all around the planet according to the local resource availability etc, do you think we'd also have a universal time reference that we'd all use all over this new planet? We'd probably align it to some natural cycle - for instance, the day as defined by an axial revolution determining sunlight/night-time distribution. Would this just be an initial convenience or would it persist past the colonization period for the rest of the time the planet is occupied?
Re: (Score:2)
The only value UTC has is as a standard time for people working across timezones. It's a useful reference point that's well known and well understood.
Noon should mean that nothing is casting any shadows. Ideas get progressively more stupid, the longer the shadows are at noon.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah... those damned chickens absolutely REFUSE to alter their method of timekeeping. Always checking the clock, looking over calendars... makes one wonder if maybe chickens built Stonehenge or something... damned chickens...
Re: (Score:2)
+1 for common sense. I'm all for shifting clocks 30 minutes to split the difference and calling it done. Time Zones are still useful because we are driven by the sun......and you need to know whether your colleague in India will be up or not if you schedule a meeting a 5pm local time (hint, probably not).
Re: (Score:2)
Because time is arbitrary, anyway. And not everyone uses DST, for that matter. There are some countries that dont use it, and there are states within the US that dont use it.
(without digging up the info) I think there is even a county or two that is inconsistent wrt DST/timezone of the state they are in.
Re:Why fix it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. Why bother trying to improve anything? If it isn't completely broken, don't try to fix it.
Re: (Score:3)
It's Internet Time all over again... (Score:4, Insightful)
First thing that came to mind on reading this article was "1998 called, they want their suggestion back".
Back in 1998 when the Web was new and cool, Swatch were attempting to market a metric alternative to the 24 hour clock, which they excitingly referred to as 'Internet Time'. It divided the day into 1,000 'beats', and was based around the Central European timezone (GMT + 1) on the basis that Swatch's headquarters are in Biel. Unsurprisingly, the concept went down like a lead balloon.
FWIW, you'd have to think about different timezones anyway. No amount of universally-shared timezones are going to change the physical reality, so they may as well reflect it.
Re:Most people don't travel or do business so glob (Score:5, Insightful)
What's wrong with saying 4 deciliters?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What's wrong with saying 4 deciliters?
or using what's done in most metric countries, namely use 250ml or 500ml ?
Re: (Score:3)
"The metric system, being decimal, is not well-suited to working with fractions.
Half-metre, quarter-metre, third of a millimetre. It's easy. What you meant - I hope - was that some fractions don't represent an integer number of some smaller measurement. This can happen with imperial measures too; try telling me what one tenth of a foot is.
Officially, you aren't even supposed to say "1/3 meter," but rather "333 millilitres."
Officially? Pah. The only official proscription that would apply here is against a millilitre being a subdivision of a metre. Apart from that there's no reason you can't ask for a half-litre of something, like beer.
For everyday uses, such as cooking, it is much more natural to use fractions.
What's natural depends on your upbri
Re: (Score:3)
Officially, you aren't even supposed to say "1/3 meter," but rather "333 milliliters." For everyday uses, such as cooking, it is much more natural to use fractions.
Well, 333mm or 330mm, depending on what precision you need. As for the "more natural", I guess it depends on tradition, decimal is more natural to me - 0.25L or 250ml, but not 1/4 L.
The 2-liter bottle seems to have become "natural," but if you want to buy a single drink, it's easier to say "a pint" or even "a 12-ounce cup" rather than "400 milliliters."
Is the "pint" some absolute unit or is it an arbitrary one (~473.2mL). Could you drink 0.5L of beer? That's how you can get beer where I live (completely metric country) - 0.3L, 0.5L, 1L (if we are talking about a bar). I have no trouble asking for "one beer, zero five" (literally translated) or a "one big beer" if the bar offer
Re: (Score:3)
Fahrenheit is more accurate than Celsius and one degree Fahrenheit is the amount of temperature change humans can sense.
Says who? I definitely can't sense a change in the amount of 1 F. Heck, even 1 C is so subtle that it takes a while to register (e.g. when setting up air conditioner).
As for accuracy, the only case I'm aware of where you need to divide one degree centigrade into fractions is when measuring body temperature. On the other hand, I'm not sure what you guys do with Fahrenheit there, since 1 F sounds like it would be too rough of a measurement for that as well (but then I'm no medic).
Celsius just takes two arbitrary points for water and divides by 100.
Water freezing point has a pr